Microserfs

by Douglas Coupland

Susan’s a real coding machine. But her abilities are totally wasted reworking old code for something like the Norwegian Macintosh version of Word 5.8.

She told me that when she was briefly on the OS/2 version 1.0 team, they sent her to the IBM branch in Boca Raton for two weeks. Apparently IBM was asking people from the data entry department whether they wanted to train to be programmers.

The less of a life, the more mail you read.

She said that she learned about coding from canning lines—or rather, she developed a fascination for linear logic processes there—and she actually has a degree in manufacturing processes, not computer programming.

we started talking more about all of the fiftysomethings being dumped out of the economy by downsizing. No one knows what to do with these people, and it’s so sad, because being 50 nowadays isn’t like being 50 a hundred years ago when you’d probably be dead.

it would have been an affront to all good souls who had worked for a better world over the millennia not to engineer a system for preserving finer thoughts after the millennium arrived and all ideologies died and people became animals once more.

At meetings you have to explain what you’ve accomplished, so naturally you fluff up your work a bit, like pillows on a couch.

Abe, like most people here, is a fiscal Republican, but otherwise, pretty empty-file in the ideology department. Vesting turns most people into fiscal Republicans, I’ve noticed.

One grudgingly has to respect someone who’s fortysomething and still in computers—there’s a core techiness there that must be respected.

if Surrealism was around today, “It’d last ten minutes and be stolen by ad agencies to sell long-distance calls and aerosol cheese products.”

“Where does morality enter our lives, Dan? How do we justify what we do to the rest of humanity? Microsoft is no Bosnia.”

“It’s no coincidence that as a species we invented the middle classes. Without the middle classes, we couldn’t have had the special type of mindset that consistently spits out computational systems, and our species could never have made it to the next level, whatever that level’s going to be. Chances are, the middle classes aren’t even a part of the next level.

“When I was younger,” she said, “I went through a phase where I wanted to be a machine. I think this is one of the normal phases that young people go through now—like The Lord of the Rings phase, the Ayn Rand phase—I honestly didn’t want to be flesh; I wanted to be ‘precision technology’—like a Los Angeles person; I listened to Kraftwerk and ‘Cars’ by Gary Numan.”

I used to play Lego with Ian Ball who lived up the street, back in Bellingham. He used to make his house out of whatever color brick he happened to grab. Can you imagine the sort of code someone like that would write?”

“We live in an era of no historical precedents—this is to say, history is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.

Nobody rules here in the Valley. No Bills. It’s a bland anarchy. It takes some getting used to.

Ethan and I drove around Silicon Valley today looking at various company parking lots to see whose workers are working on a Sunday. He says that’s the surest way to tell which company to invest in. “If the techies aren’t grinding, the stock ain’t climbing.”

Trying to find money through venture capital is a long, evil, conflictual process full of hype and hope.

Only think of money in terms of other things. For example: two weeks of bug-checking equals a Y-class ticket to Boston. That sort of thing. If you think of money simply as numbers then you’re doomed.”

Networked games, like where you have one person playing against another, are hot because you don’t have to waste development dollars creating artificial intelligence.

I think “van art” and Yes album covers were the biggest influence in game design.

I think you only ever truly feel comfortable with the level of digitization that was normal for you from the age of five to fifteen.

“One of the main reasons people start companies is to control their environment and the people they work with.”

everybody is dyspraxic, dear. It’s called procrastination.”

geek implies hireability, whereas nerd doesn’t necessarily mean your skills are 100 percent sellable.

Being “in the loop” is this year’s big expression. Only three more weeks remain before the phrase becomes obsolete, like an Apple Lisa computer. Language is such a technology.

“One’s perception of time’s flow is directly linked to the number of connections one has to the outer world. Technology increases the number of connections, thus it alters the perception of having ‘experienced’ time.

Knowing too much about the world can make you unloving—and maybe unlovable.

(“Screensavers are the macramé of the ‘90s,”

In the 1980s, corporate integration punctured the next realm of corporate life invasion at “campuses” like Microsoft and Apple—with the next level of intrusion being that the borderline between work and life blurred to the point of unrecognizability. Give us your entire life or we won’t allow you to work on cool projects. In the 1990s, corporations don’t even hire people anymore. People become their own corporations. It was inevitable.

I saw a woman’s card from Hewlett-Packard and a card from some guy in Mexico saying “Graduate from Stanford Graduate School of Business.” Here’s this Stanford graduate at McDonald’s putting his card in a box at random. I just don’t understand people sometimes. Didn’t he learn anything at Stanford?

actually, Stalinism is an application, not an operating system. I mean, if you want to wipe out 40 million people, you install Stalinism on your hard drive. It’s like a political ebola virus.”

we figured that bar codes will be obsolete soon enough, and having one on your shoulder or forehead would be like having a Betamax tattooed on your shoulder or forehead.

“Man, I’m so happy I could crap,”

Nintendo’s Virtual Boy seemed the most advanced thing we’d seen here.